Lawyer for Hernandez's cousin argues home confinement is best option in light of cancer prognosis

Attorney E. Peter Parker says Tanya Singleton will plead guilty to criminal contempt charge but that her best chance for "some semblance of quality of life" and treatment would be outside of incarceration.

FALL RIVER — Aaron Hernandez’s cousin Tanya Singleton has breast cancer that is metastatic and incurable, and it will lead to her death, her lawyer said in court documents filed Thursday in superior court.

Defense attorney E. Peter Parker said home confinement in Connecticut is Singleton’s best chance to have “some semblance of quality of life” while she undergoes a new, aggressive chemotherapy regimen to battle the cancer that has spread to her liver and lymph nodes.

“That cannot happen if she is incarcerated again,” Parker wrote in a sentencing memorandum.

Singleton, 38, of Bristol, Connecticut, will plead guilty next Tuesday to a criminal contempt charge. Prosecutors said she refused to testify before a grand jury that heard evidence last summer in the June 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd in North Attleborough.

Before being released in January, Singleton spent six months in a Massachusetts jail, which Parker blames for her health deteriorating.

Singleton was first diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2011. By March 2012, she was in remission, but her incarceration in August 2013 caused a “break in therapy” in which she did not receive her regularly scheduled chemotherapy injections, Parker said.

Parker is asking that Judge E. Susan Garsh impose a one-year sentence — with Singleton being credited 196 days of time served — with the balance suspended for one year while she serves her time in home confinement. Incarceration, Parker said, would bring Singleton much closer to a premature death

“That is not a legitimate component of punishment. It is radically disproportionate to the offense of conviction and would, in fact, be cruel and unusual,” Parker wrote.

Singleton is still facing another contempt charge in Suffolk County after allegedly refusing to testify before a grand jury there that heard evidence in a 2012 drive-by shooting that left two men dead in Boston.

Hernandez, 24, the former New England Patriots tight end, is facing murder charges in Bristol and Suffolk counties. Prosecutors say he orchestrated Lloyd’s murder in the North Attleborough Industrial Park in June 2013, and that he shot and killed two men after a confrontation inside a Boston nightclub in June 2012.

Hernandez, who is being held without bail, is scheduled to appear Monday in Fall River Superior Court for a motion hearing.

Meanwhile, Singleton is also facing a charge of conspiracy to commit accessory after the fact because prosecutors said she tried to help Hernandez’s two alleged accomplices in Lloyd’s murder flee Massachusetts after police began their investigation.

Parker said the grand jury subpoena that called upon Singleton to testify put her at an “emotionally supercharged crossroads” to testify about her younger cousin, whom she loved as if he were her own son.

Page 2 of 2 - “Her decision not to testify came from her heart. It did not come from adherence to a so-called ‘code of the street’ that disfavors cooperation with law enforcement or the related desire not to be known as a snitch,” Parker said, adding that not testifying was “the hardest things she ever had to endure.”

“She could not be a mother to her two young boys from jail,” Parker wrote. “She could not get adequate medical treatment. For that, she may end up paying the ultimate price."